This is a tricky thing to take in. It got dropped on me this morning while listening to NPR on the way to work, and I reeled. I'd only checked the ABC News website not 48 hours before and there'd been no hint that this was in the offing; now all of a sudden Australian's got it's first HBIC and I'm torn between feeling thrilled to the core that a woman - a competent, intelligent, effective woman (i.e., Bishop, Hanson and Palin: not you) - is running things; impressed by her ability to make such a tough choice and act on it quickly and successfully; and absolutely effing terrified that Labor has just handed this year's election to Tony Abbott. I've thought long and hard about this, and I believe that I would rather see John Howard back in power than Tony Abbott. That's how much I fear that lunatic.
This morning I read a piece by Annabel Crabb that said that while Rudd was popular with the electorate, he was never much liked by other politicians, and when his public rating started to slip there were very few people left to catch him. Gillard is, by all accounts that I read/heard, very popular with and well-respected by other pols; however, I'm worried that she's not nearly as well-liked by the public, and they're the ones who'll be deciding if she keeps the job. The problem is, while Gillard is smart and experienced and a hell of a politician, she's also a bit of a cold fish (Josh Thomas memorably referred to her as the Queen of Narnia), a fact that will count against her even more because she's a woman. She's not soft, she's not maternal, and she's not a sex object; she's the boss that the men refer to as a ballbuster because she got further than they did and doesn't put up with blokey bullshit. She can't be accused of having slept her way to the top, so she must have castrated her way there instead.
And she's a ranga besides.
I didn't mean for this to turn into a feminist dialectic. And let me make myself perfectly clear: if allowed to govern, Julia Gillard will be excellent; I do not doubt that for a moment. I'm just not at all sure she'll be allowed to govern.
What's killing me on a personal level is that I had no idea this was in the offing. Even with all my reading I can't get a feel for the timeframe of the whole thing, apart from 'really fucking quick', but I can't help but think that if I were there I would have had some inkling, some insight that things were afoot. And if I didn't, if it had been the shock to me there that it was here, I'd have rung Anthony and Paul and Alison and Hamish and Nikki and Michelle and Amanda and Emily and Stuart and we'd have sat around with our soda waters and beers and Long Island iced teas and absinthe and talked and talked and talked until I felt like I had some grasp on it, like I knew what to think. I feel very, very far from home at this moment.
XOXO
